


hadn't she seen?

by kattyshack



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Universe, F/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 05:34:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10155002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattyshack/pseuds/kattyshack
Summary: When Jon and Sansa have been reunited and the battle for Winterfell won, not everyone looks optimistically towards the future. Indeed, Petyr Baelish is thrust back into his childhood, pining for a Tully girl guarded by a Stark boy with a blade.





	

He had seen it as soon as he could, when the battle was done and wounds were being tended to. He saw it through the snow that fell upon them, saw it through the smoke that curled in the air from the burning bodies of the fallen in the distance. It was never any secret that Ned Stark’s bastard favored him in looks so there could be no mistake to whom the boy belonged, but Petyr never imagined it would matter to _him_.

But when he sees Sansa beside the boy, her spine as ramrod straight as her mother’s had been, and his black hair wild and grey eyes stoic as any Stark’s, Petyr is thrust into his boyhood again, watching a woman he couldn’t have standing beside the man who could.

Not that either of them know. But Petyr knows, and it’s enough to shake his usual ease.

And so he keeps watching, keeps seeing. The boy is tender with her, and she doesn’t flinch when he touches her, doesn’t step back—no, she _leans into_ him. She moves when he moves, and he’s always half a step ahead, as though ready to draw his sword at anything that might want her. He is a man of honor who will lay his life down for her, but he can’t be beat. He is a soldier, a warrior, the knight she once wanted, when she sprang forth eagerly into womanhood because she thought she knew what she wanted, because she didn’t know any better.

Now, though, she knows. Her traumas have come from men meant to love her, men who didn’t, so what can she think of any of them now? How could she want any man after what they’ve done to her?

She regards even Petyr with a sort of polite contempt, and he’d given her everything. Ned Stark’s bastard may have gone to war for her, but Petyr had won it in her name. He would do anything for her, anything she asked of him, just as he’d done for her mother before her.

But it’s the bastard Snow she gives her smiles to. It’s Snow who is touched by the soft leather fingertips of her gloves. It’s Snow she walks with through the courtyards of their broken home. It’s Snow she goes to when she can’t sleep:

Petyr had seen her, pale face illuminated by the shuddering flame of a candle as she made her way to Snow’s room in the middle of the night. The first time, Petyr had slunk back into the shadows of the corridor as Sansa rapped her knuckles on the door. He’d watched as Snow opened it and stood aside to let her in, his hand moving to the small of her back as he ushered her inside. His eyes were only half open, but even at the distance Petyr could see the want in them as they followed Sansa’s silhouette into the room. The longing radiated from the boy, Petyr thought, and Sansa was a fool not to see it.

After that first night, Petyr sees it more often—the want, the need, the reckless abandon with which Jon Snow touches his presumed half-sister. He sees Sansa’s body respond to him, the way she turns into him when he puts a hand to her elbow, the way she smiles at him when he smiles at her, the way she smiles less when he’s not near.

Petyr sees Jon Snow’s eyes linger, and he knows.

* * *

 

Her hair is fire and her eyes are ice, and Jon can’t help but devour her with his gaze as though he’s drowning and aflame all at once and only she can save him.

She sweeps through the halls of Winterfell as effortlessly as if it had never been tainted, but she comes to him late at night, a shattered illusion. He’s seen the scars on her body, long and white against longer and whiter limbs. He hadn’t wanted to see, but she’d needed to show him, and he’d felt a stirring within him when he saw the flesh she revealed to him—back and thighs and shoulders, collarbone and ribcage. It made him wish violent wishes upon the already dead man who’d done this to her. It made him want to press his lips to the marks and murmur into her skin, _you should be loved_.

But he shouldn’t touch her that way. So instead they drink together at midnight, and the ale has them laughing until their chests ache. The feeling never subsides; he always aches when she’s near.

* * *

 

“What do you want?” she asks, as if she knows but she wants him to tell her, only so she can laugh at him, just as her uncle had so many years ago.

She stands beneath the weirwood tree, skin as white as its bark and hair as red as its leaves, eyes as clear and blue as the hot spring at their feet. Petyr is flush with their steam and his hands itch to touch her, as they’d itched to claim her mother and kept on itching when they couldn’t have her.

Not this time, Petyr swears to himself, and steps forward with a purpose that has to be unparalleled to the way her bastard brother looks upon her. Jon Snow sits and waits and pines, pathetic boy. He sits and waits and Petyr _takes_.

“I thought you knew what I wanted.”

His mind shifts, and for a moment he sees Catelyn, who smiles softly at him. There is something too much like pity in her eyes, and so something like rage swirls within him.

His vision clears, and Sansa stands before him. There is no soft smile, no pity, nothing so much as mercy. There is only Sansa, and he can see that she doesn’t want him. But he wants her, and that, Petyr thinks, should be enough. He’s done everything for her so she could be everything to him. He can show her.

“Lord Baelish—” she begins, firmly, coldly, but it’s as far as he’ll allow her to go. He seizes her arms in the iron of his fingers and jerks her forward, so he can trap her mouth beneath his and douse the protests she’d been about to make. She can’t hate him forever, can’t deny him when he shows her how badly he wants her—he’d fought for Cat, but he’ll wear Sansa down with his greed for her. He is no fighter, no soldier, but he can paint her pretty pictures of the knight she doesn’t believe in anymore. Her bastard brother may sit and torture himself over what he feels for her, but Petyr will ride into the fray of her thoughts and gain her favor, win her hand, and she’ll forget the way Jon Snow wants to touch her.

Because Jon Snow will never touch her, not like this, Petyr vows as his tongue sweeps over Sansa’s lips and she doesn’t respond. She’s his, he thinks, but his mind is so muddled that he hardly knows what he means.

There’s no time to examine it, no time to do more than probe her lips apart and get a taste of the sweetness of her insides—because a grip like ice takes hold of his shoulder and wrenches him off her, so that his mouth is hungry and his hands are bare of the feeling of her. He’s spun around by sheer force, and sees nothing but a flash of Jon Snow’s fury before the boy’s fist collides with his face and splits it in two.

His bones crack and the boy’s knuckles break open. Their blood mingles and Petyr feels as though he’ll cough up a lung in the hot, untempered pain that follows. There’s a whimper that can only be Sansa’s, but Petyr’s vision is so overcome with bright flashing lights that he can’t ascertain its origin; he has no way to know that it’s he who makes the sound.

 _“Jon—”_ Sansa’s voice is an alarm, a warning, a prayer.

The hand that didn’t strike is curled in the wool of Petyr’s cloak, shoving him back, away from Sansa. This boy they call Ned Stark’s bastard has his knuckles on Petyr’s throat, rattling his Adam’s apple. Petyr can hardly breathe but he manages a sneer through the pain of his broken nose; it’s all he has left.

“Don’t you _ever_ —” the boy’s voice is at once a man’s threat and a wolf’s growl—“let me see you put your hands on my sister again.”

Petyr laughs. It’s all he can do. The Stark brothers who stole Cat away from him may as well have called her sister, too, for all the good it would have done him, for all the good it does him now. He is shamed, his anger simmering, and he’ll goad the bastard within an inch of his life if it means he can walk away with as much of a shred of his own dignity intact.

“Your sister? Oh, I think she’s something other than that to you—brothers don’t look at their sisters like that, Lord Snow.” A trickle of blood drips into the indent above Petyr’s lips. It stains the gray prickles above his mouth, which curves into a knowing smirk. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you. But perhaps there’s no need for you to worry about that, is there?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Petyr’s smirk is twisted, indulging in what he inspires within this noble bastard boy and the girl who watches them both. “Didn’t you ever wonder who your mother was? The woman who could tempt the honorable Ned Stark away from his beloved wife? Could any woman truly do such a thing?”

“Stop it.” Sansa’s voice shakes once, but the fury he’s ignited is unyielding.

But Petyr’s eyes are on Jon now, all for the man whose eyes are all for Sansa. “Didn’t you?”

Jon says nothing. He won’t egg this on, won’t entertain whatever it is that Petyr’s trying to make him believe. But he blinks, and Petyr has him as assuredly as if the boy had opened his mouth and spoke his own doom.

Petyr tilts his head, lowers his voice, just enough so that Sansa doesn’t notice, just enough so that Jon Snow knows these words are for him alone:

“What if I told you that you could have her?”

Jon’s eyes shift to Sansa then, so fleetingly that it’s almost imperceptible, but Petyr sees and his smirk spreads wide in soundless laughter.

“You do want her, don’t you?” he says, still hushed enough so that only Jon hears. Sansa needn’t know that her brother is being pushed to the edge for her sake, because of her. “You wouldn’t be the only man who did. But it’s wrong, isn’t it, for a brother to look at his sister the way you look at her?”

Jon’s hand tightens on Petyr’s cloak and he looks as though he may hit him again. _Let him_ , Petyr thinks. Let the boy strike. His mind flashes back, to the figure of a tall and proud Brandon Stark towering over him. Brandon Stark, drawing his sword while Cat ordered mercy on Petyr’s behalf. Brandon Stark, who mocked Petyr for his foolish lust, who taught him to know better but Petyr had never learned. Because Petyr would take a thousand hits, all for a handful of taunts spit by his own tongue.

The scar down his chest seems to burn as though it’s cut open fresh. Brandon Stark had left that mark upon him, and Cat had married his brother beneath this very tree.

And here is Jon Snow, bastard born and raised. Steady hands and gritted teeth. Bloody knuckles and wild eyes. A baseborn boy grown to a man who slew his enemies with a slash of his sword, but who could do nothing but pretend not to want his father’s daughter as he does. But Petyr had seen, and he won’t let Jon Snow forget.

“Don’t fool yourself, boy,” Petyr tells him now. “You haven’t fooled me.”

Petyr’s hand comes up to pry Jon’s fingers from his cloak. The bastard is frostbit down to his bones. His skin is chapped, knuckles red from cold and cracked from their contact with Petyr’s still-bleeding nose.

“You’ve no reason to trust me—”

“Why should I, then?”

“Because I’m telling you that you can have what you want. Isn’t that what you need? Someone to tell you to take what you didn’t think you could have?” Petyr lifts one eyebrow in a challenge to make his opponent doubt himself. “Will she have you, well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it? You may be a war hero, Lord Snow, but don’t tell me you can’t be broken.”

The boy’s jaw is set when Petyr turns to Sansa and bows deeply. “Apologies, my lady. We’ll speak again soon.”

But Sansa’s gaze is all for Jon, and Petyr resigns himself to a flick of his cloak as he departs the godswood.

* * *

 

That night, as every other, Sansa comes to Jon’s door. He is awake, waiting for her because he knew she’d come and he can’t sleep when he doesn’t know if she is. He opens the door with his haphazardly bandaged hand, and touches her elbow with his uninjured one as she steps over the threshold.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be awake, after the day you’ve had,” Sansa remarks, almost coolly enough to make Jon flinch. But she tosses him a wry grin as she finds a place on the settee before the popping fire, and her eyes are only a little sadder than usual. She doesn’t mean to chastise him, then, he thinks, but he’d prefer her to come to him on happier terms—he’d prefer her to come to him in any way, but he can’t bear to see her brokenhearted anymore.

_You should be loved._

Jon settles beside her and pours a goblet of ale from the jug in front of them. He passes it to Sansa first, and she swigs from it, only a little less of the lady she once strived to be. But afterwards she touches her fingertips to her lips to wipe away the excess, and Jon’s insides stir with the want that would have him licking it from her lips instead.

He can’t do this.

“Do you want me to apologize?” he wants to know, and is relieved when Sansa shakes her head.

“No,” she says, and passes the goblet. His fingers close over hers for the briefest of moments as he takes it from her, and he drinks deeply in a fool’s attempt to drown his desires. “I wanted to thank you.”

Jon keeps his eyes on the rim of the glass. He doesn’t speak for what feels like a long moment, and his voice is quiet when he does. “He shouldn’t have touched you.”

“Well…” Sansa’s voice is just as soft, a little more resigned, but she says nothing more. She doesn’t need to. Jon knows that Petyr Baelish has touched her before, when he wasn’t there to stop it. Just like Joffrey, just like Ramsay. Her scars cut deeper than her skin, and there was never anything he could do about it.

He would have dwelled on this forever, if Sansa didn’t bring him back. Her words are grounded and shattering, and he wonders how he can stand straight on his feet when she’s around.

“What did he mean?”

Jon knows what she’s asking, but he can’t bring himself to answer straightaway. “About what?”

Sansa takes a steadying breath, her eyes on the fire, away from Jon but fixed on a point just beyond him, so all she sees is a sliver of his face in her peripheral vision—just enough to gauge his reaction if she wanted to, but not enough that she couldn’t ignore it if she doesn’t like what she sees. “About the way… you look at me.”

Jon shifts in his seat. His hands grasp the near-empty goblet as though it would anchor him to this reality. Hadn’t she noticed? Hadn’t she seen? When she’d arrived at Castle Black, when they’d sat together by the fireside that first night and all those that followed. When she’d contributed to their war council, when she’d headed their inquiry to Lady Mormont and refused the blame anyone would place upon her. When she’d forced Lord Glover into admitting his disloyalty and she’d taken his verbal beating, every ugly word of it, and still she’d never backed down.

When she promised him she’d never go back to Winterfell if Ramsay won, how she hadn’t said it but she would have taken her own life. When he’d sworn he would never let that monster put his hands on her again, and she’d wanted so badly to believe him but she knew better than that—not because she couldn’t trust Jon, but because she _wanted_ to, was desperate to, even when there was no hope. When she’d arrived at the unraveling battle with an army at her back. When, at the end of it all, he’d given Ramsay to her.

When his hand had cradled her face and he’d lingered over his lips on her hairline. She’d smelled like snow and her skin had been warm as the flame on a candle. And he’d never wanted to let go, dreaded the moment she would step out of his hold, and she had to know how he ached when she wasn’t within arm’s reach.

Hadn’t she seen?

He’d _reveled_ in her—her arms around him and his around her, her always unwavering gaze. Her laugh that had sounded so hoarse from lack of use when she’d first come back into his life and taken his heart as though it had always been hers. The way she stood at his side even as she challenged him, how she proved him wrong and saved his life.

He’d gone to war for her, and still she doesn’t know?

He’d gone to war for her, but she is where he goes when there’s no fight left in him.

And now Lord Petyr Baelish presumes to take all of this away? Now he fancies himself a reward, and has set his sights on Sansa to fulfill it? Jon knows what this esteemed old lord wants, and he’d sooner dash the man’s skull against the walls of Winterfell before he let him have her.

_Never._

But he can’t answer her question, so he diverts her attention with one of his own. Although he knows what she’ll say, he needs to hear her say it, so he swallows the sandpaper dryness of his throat and asks, “What does he want?”

Sansa watches the fire dance in its grate. “For me to marry him.”

Jon shuts his eyes against the words. “And what did you tell him?”

“Nothing. He didn’t even have the chance to ask,” Sansa adds. She looks at him then, and smiles. It could break his heart if she meant it to.

“What _will_ you tell him?”

She takes the goblet from his hands and drains what’s left in it. She fills it again. She’s desperate and scared and all of the ale in the world won’t make that go away, but hell if she won’t try—she’s so tired of being scared.

“What can I do? I can hold Winterfell for a time, but we’ll always have enemies, we’ll always need allies. And with Bran—” Sansa can’t bring herself to say _gone_ , so she won’t. She takes a breath and another drink. “Until Bran comes home, Winterfell needs an heir. I can’t just pull a son out of thin air, can I?”

Jon puts his hands on his thighs and pushes himself up to pace the room. It’s too much to sit beside her and listen to her words, her mind all but made up as far as Jon can tell. He knows she’s right, that eventually it would come to this, but it’s too much for him to think about her bound in another union with just another caliber of monster.

_You should be loved._

“It doesn’t have to be with him,” Jon says, his voice low and more broken than he wanted her to know.

Sansa stares at his back, firelight flickering off the butter-smooth black leather of the doublet he hadn’t bothered to change out of. A thin strap still ties his wild black curls in a knot at the nape of his neck, but the hair is mussed as though he’s been running his hands agitatedly through it. His bandaged fingers twitch.

“Who else will have me?” she demands of him in her frustration. “I’ve been married off twice, I don’t exactly have knights and lords lining up for my hand now. The only _honor_ —” she spits the word —“I have left is my title. All I have left is duty. I’ve done what I wanted and now I have something more to prove. We’ve taken back Winterfell and now I have to find out a way to keep it. This is it, Jon, it’s all I’ve got left. I don’t want to. But I don’t know what else I can do. I don’t know who else I’m supposed to turn to.”

“Me, Sansa,” he says, turning to face her as quickly as he’d stood a moment ago. He sounds angrier than he meant to be; he hadn’t even meant to say the words aloud at all. A second of ringing silence meets his words, and he feels the need to fill it, however uselessly. “You could have me.”

He doesn’t want to fight with her. Not now, not after they’ve won back their home. Not about this. Not when he doesn’t know that he has any right to this, to her, no matter what Petyr Baelish had said to torture him. He doesn’t know if the man had lied to set a trap for him, to crush him, but it wouldn’t have mattered—Jon couldn’t stand for his own silence any longer. He needs her to know how he needs her. He needs to know if she needs him the same.

He needs her to see.

Sansa stares at him. She only blinks once. He can’t mean what he sounds like he meant… can he? She thinks she may have gone mad from the want of it, but she can’t keep giving herself up to men when she doesn’t know what they mean to do with her. She has to play safe, _must_ be cautious, and she can’t lose him. So she says, “That’s not what I meant.”

It’s Jon’s turn to blink. “What?”

“I didn’t mean—” Sansa wants to look at her hands, to look anywhere but the blankness of Jon’s face. But she doesn’t. She looks at him, trying to see… “I _know_ I have you, Jon, you’re the only person I’ve got—”

He shakes his head, unable to believe it—what he’s said, what he will say, how she still doesn’t see it. “That’s not what _I_ meant.”

Her heart shudders. “What?” They could go on like this for hours; Jon feels as though they have already. There’s nothing else for it, nothing else he wants. He kicks the chair that’s in his way aside and takes the three long strides it takes to get to her. All at once he pushes one hand through her hair, tucking it back behind her ear and his grip stays there, cradling her face, and his mouth is on hers before she can take a breath. Her mouth matches his in want, in greed, in the subdued longing that has culminated in this relief. Her fingers close around his wrist and he knows she must feel the pulse there, knows that perhaps what she does to him will make her see at last what she means to him.

His mouth opens at the press of hers, and he pours everything he can into that first exchange of breath—

His fingers trace her earlobe. _You should be loved._

Her free hand curls into the front of his vest to pull him closer. _I should love you._

His injured hand is on her ribcage and he can feel the beat of her heart underneath all her scars. _I do love you._

Now, as his lips murmur a prayer against hers, and even with her eyes closed, she sees. She is exquisite strength between his hands, and he would hold her forever if she’ll let him.

* * *

Snow dusts down from the gray sky above, and the courtyard is alive with the chopping of wood and men’s loud and gruff guffaws. There is mirth in this, the rebuilding of a home, the strengthening of a fortress. Small bonfires crack in the breeze and keep their hands warm. Winter has come, and the wolves have come with it.

The wild-haired bastard boy walks with the girl whose eyes are like the ice in the air. Their booted feet leave tracks in the snow that’s accumulated around them, and the flakes melt when they meet the hem of his cloak. Her cheeks are pink from the chill, and pinker still when her boy looks upon her.

Petyr sees Jon Snow’s eyes linger, and he knows.

He sees Sansa’s gloved fingertips on the back of her bastard brother’s neck, and he can almost feel her heart swell.


End file.
